coffee

An interesting part of working on the Building Management and Control (BMaC) project – as previously covered on this site – was the reverse-engineering and ultimately the gaining of full control over the coffee machines at the office. Not the boring filter coffee machines, mind you, but the fully automatic espresso machine type that grinds beans, makes coffee, adds milk, and much more. Depending on one’s budget, naturally.

These little marvels of engineering contain meters of tubing, dozens of sensors, valves, ceramic grinders, and heating elements. The complexity of this machinery made us think that maybe there was more that we could do with these machines beyond what their existing programming and predefined products would allow. Naturally, there was.

I couldn’t decide between normal and decaffeinated coffee. So to eliminate delays in my morning routine, and decision fatigue, I’ve designed the Schrödinger Quantum Percolator — making the state of my coffee formally undecidable until I drink it.

At its core, the Quantum Percolator contains a novel quantum event detector that uses electron tunneling to determine whether to use caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. The mechanical components are enclosed in an opaque box, so I can’t tell which type of coffee is being used.

The result is coffee that simultaneously contains and does not contain caffeine – at least until you collapse the caffeination probability waveform by drinking it. As the expression goes, you can’t have your quantum superposition of states and drink it too!

PC gamers have the benefit of the mouse and keyboard, which are highly flexible when it comes to input devices for gaming. What’s more, the freedom of the platform means that it’s easy to whip up whatever mad controller you can dream of to best suit the games you’re playing. Enter [Tom Tilley] with the aptly-named Hipster Game Controller.

Yes, this is a controller made out of a coffee grinder. The hand-crank setup makes it perfect for imitating the game board in that puzzle classic, Bust-A-Move. [Tom] interfaces the controller in a perfectly hacky way – the scroll wheel from a mouse is removed from the case and zip tied to the shaft of the grinder, allowing the rotation of the grinder to turn the wheel. The mouse wheel is then mapped as the aim control in the game – it really is that simple. An arcade button is also fitted into a mug and wired into the left mouse button to act as the trigger.

[Tom] notes that while you can fill the grinder up while you play, it makes playing the game very hard work. It’s a hacky build to show that sometimes, you don’t need a microcontroller and lines of code – just a mouse, some wire, and a healthy dose of ingenuity.

The Moka pot is an industrial design classic, hailing from Italy in the early part of the 20th century. To this day, it remains an excellent way to brew top quality coffee at home with affordable equipment. However, if your tastes for coffee lie more towards lattes than espresso, you’re out of luck – unless you’ve got one of these.

[Create] started with a classic Moka pot for this project, and set out to build a stovetop milk steamer. The top reservoir is quickly cut away, and a tap fitted atop the lower water reservoir. This allows the flow of steam from the lower reservoir to be controlled. A steel pipe is then fitted to the tap, which is bent, crushed, and soldered to form a nozzle for steaming the milk. It’s then finished off with beautiful wooden handles for a nice aesthetic touch.

While we’re not sure the soldering process or tap used are food grade, there are workarounds for that, and it’s a project that could easily be pulled off in a weekend. What’s more, you can celebrate your new creation with a delicious hot cappuccino. What could be better? Now all you need is your own special roast. Video after the break.

Coffee is the lifeblood of hackers, IT workers, and apparently, IT workers who are also hackers. [Omerfarukz] is clearly the latter. He works as part of a large team spread over multiple floors, all with coffee machines, any one of which is fair game. The problem is knowing which one has coffee that is ready to pour. He needed a non-invasive way to monitor the coffee machines.

After contemplating a few solutions, he opted for one which wouldn’t offend the coffee gods. The machines use a high current to produce their heat, so he adapted some old remote control power sockets for the machines to plug into which would now monitor the current. A high current means the coffee is brewing and he knew that brewing takes one minute per cup, so the duration of the high current tells him the number of cups.

Having had no success with a current sensing transformer, he opted for an ACS712 chip, at heart a Hall effect sensor which outputs a voltage proportional to the test current. That goes to the IO pins of an ATtiny, and from there via serial to an ESP8266 and thence to Google Firebase for processing and notifying of IT workers in need of stimulation. For those wishing to partake, he’s posted the circuit on Github.

[Rulof Maker] is a master at making things from salvaged parts, and being an Italian lover of espresso coffee, this time he’s made an espresso machine. The parts in question are a piston and cylinder from an old motorbike, believe it or not, and parts from an IKEA lamp.

Why the piston and cylinder? For those not familiar with espresso machines, they work by forcing pressurized, almost boiling water through ground coffee. He therefore puts the water in the piston cylinder, and levers the piston down onto it, forcing the water out the bottom of the cylinder and through the waiting coffee grounds. Parts from the IKEA lamp form a base for the waiting cup to sit on.

Of course, he takes great care to clean out any burnt oil and gas before starting. We also like how he centers a lever arm on a U-shaped bolt using two springs. Clever. But see the master in action for yourself in the video below.

If you ask us, one of life’s greatest pleasures is sitting down with a nice, hot cup of something of coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Of course, the best part of this ritual is when the beverage has cooled enough to reach that short window of optimal drinking temperature.

[Scott] enlisted a friend to smith a thick copper slab in a right angle formation. The gentle curve of the vertical side pulls heat from the ceramic mug and transfers it to the heat sink of a CPU cooler. Then it’s just a matter of stepping up the voltage produced by the thermoelectric generator with a boost converter. Once he’s got this dialed in, he’d like to power it with supercaps and add a temp sensor and a microcontroller to alert him that his moment of zen is imminent. We’ll drink to that!